Looong time no see!

Hello Everyone!  It has been a busy past month or so (or however long it's been since I wrote).  My time here is dwindling... I now have only 11 days left here in Pune before I leave to go travel in Northern India for 6 days.  In that 11 days I have to write my research paper and make a presentation on the organized efforts of individuals and organizations to create communal harmony between the Hindu and Muslim people (I just finished conducting interviews and doing the research part today), practice and attempt to memorize my flute piece that I will perform on the 5th, pack (let's hope everything fits!!), and then get myself to Mumbai to fly to the north.   I will leave Pune May 6th to be driven by car to Mumbai where my friend Ellen and I will take a plane to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, a state in Northern India.  We will stay there one night and then go to Pushkar, which is  Wow.  I can hardly believe that four months have flown by so quickly.  It has definitely been a very difficult semester for me, but I know I will miss India a lot.  My prediction is that when I arrive in the US:  1)  I will freeze: the daily temperature here has been around 40-42 degrees Celsius, so about 104 to 107 degrees Fahrenheit.  And where I am going in the north, to Jaipur and Agra, I have been told it may get as hot as 50 C or 122 F.  So coming back home to the US where it is spring and maybe in the 80's F at the highest, I am sure that it will feel freezing to me in comparison to what I've been living in recently.   2)  The US will seem very drab and not nearly as colorful as India: women and men here wear bright oranges, reds, lime greens, purples.... whatever color you can think of you'll probably find on the streets of India.  It's almost like a live fashion show for me.  Some days I really wish I could just take a picture of every beautiful outfit that someone was wearing and get a replicate made immediately.  They are just so gorgeous!  And it's not just that they choose bright colors (I saw a woman in a highlighter-orange sari the other day), but they will wear them together.  The other day I saw a woman in orange pants with a purple tunic, and a man wearing a lime green shirt with dark blue pants.  They're just so colorful!!!!   3)  The streets will feel empty and weird: no rickshaws, bikes, scooters, bicycles and the occasional animal (camel, donkey, ox-pulled cart or rarely a horse)?  I am sure that crosswalks will feel like the strangest things ever.  "Why is everyone stopped?  Are they looking at me??"  =p  I'm so used to just wading through the moving/stopped traffic now - not to say that it is not still exciting and sometimes quite terrifying to cross the street, but I am getting used to it.   4)  No tea?!  And where's my rose/sweet green flavored milk?!  I have gotten quite used to having tea at least once a day (sometimes twice or three times, if you're lucky or really want it).  And every day when I come home in the afternoons/evenings, Amma (my host mom) will ask me "What now?" meaning "What would you like now?"  The options are usually tea, lime juice (squeezed lemons in water with some sugar and salt so that it kinda tastes like a gatorade-like drink, or milk (pink: rose-flavored with a spoonful of honeyed rose petals, if I'm lucky, or green: a green, sweet syrup that is a common flavor here.  It's good).  I usually go for the milk, doing a different color every other day or so.  =)   5)  No chapati???  Why isn't everyone eating with their hands?!  Hot chapatis, or the tortilla-like breads that they eat with every meal here are sooo delicious when just hot off the stove.  SOOOO good!  Most of the time I eat with my hands here at home.  I usually have two chapatis with a little bowl of spiced vegetables or lentils (called dal) and then some rice to eat the last bit of dal with - all with my hands.   6)  Fresh coconut juice from the coconut vendors in the street: with one chop they cut off the top of the coconut, pop in a straw and wait as you drink the juice out.  Another few chops later and they have cut open the coconut and made a spoon from the husk so that you can scrape the coconut meat out of the inside.   7)  Fruit vendors: they are everywhere!  It makes it very easy to buy fruit and vegetables.  You just tell them how much you want, they put the appropriate weight on one side of the scale and then give you that much in your preferred fruit/vegetable.   8)  Tailors!!!!  I love being able to choose fabrics and have things made for me so easily.  Even men can have a western dress shirt made for them in a day!  It's amazing!   9)  Flute lessons: I think my flute professor is one of my favorite people in India.  He is so cool, easy to talk to and always invites me to his concerts.  Last Sunday I went and saw him perform and took some videos of parts of his songs.  This is his super cool website: sunilavachat.com.  Please notice the fourth flute from the right at the top of the page.  It has four dark purple-maroon stripes.  That's my flute!  He said he still has and plays all of the others.  Mine is the only one missing.  I feel very honored.  He made all of them, too!  Here are links to the youtube videos I posted:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIglhxDLlag http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1EIyaDfEVM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhIvmWxFGrk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2ORJUAt6xI What I am looking forward to:  1) Salad!!!  They don't have lettuce here as it is to hard to grow it safely (due to the cleanliness of the water).  Maybe because of this, raw vegetables in general really aren't their thing.   2) A washing machine that doesn't eat my clothes up!  The washing machine in our house is SOOOO hard on my clothes - both Indian and the few western clothing items I have!  And boy does it wring them out well!  It's kind of annoying actually, as that means I have to nearly soak my clothes again just to get the wrinkles out!  I am not a big iron fan because it's too hot and because it takes too much time so whenever I can I use water and gravity to dry the wrinkles out. 3) Foods that have little to no oil and no sugar.  They use a lot of oil in many of their foods, and unfortunately that doesn't always go well with my stomach.  And for drinks or foods that require sugar, they put TONS of sugar in them.  My tea is usually VERY sweet.   I'm sure that there will be much much more that I will miss, and a ton that I am looking forward to, but I just thought I would write down some of the things I could think of.  It will be interesting to compare them to what I actually experience when I come home to the US.  =) By the way, here is a link to my pictures from Marie and my trip to Southern India.  I rode on an elephant!!!!  It was a ton of fun and I really enjoyed all my adventures with Marie.   http://picasaweb.google.com/kaiarange/OurTripToKeralaInSouthernIndia?feat=directlink This past month I also went to a tribal village in northern Maharashtra (the state I'm in) but I still have to label and post the pictures so they will come later.   I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!  If I don't manage to post before I return to the US, I will see you all soon! Acchaa!  (How they say "bye" here, in Marathi) ~ Kaia (^_^)